quarters:

"The bow compartment is tight!"

"The stern compartments tight!"

"The engine room all safe!"

Then the boat unexpectedly began to list. The bow sunk, and the stern
arose. The ship careened violently, although the diving rudder was set
hard against this.

"Herr Captain," Groening, who was in charge of the diving rudder,
shouted, "something has happened. The boat does not obey the rudder. We
must have gotten hooked into some trap--a line or maybe a net. It's hell.
That's all that's needed. We are jammed into some net, and all around us
the mines are lining it. It's enough to set you crazy."

"Listen," I called down. "We must go through it. Put the diving rudder
down hard! Both engines full speed ahead! On no condition must we rise!
We must stay down at all costs. All around above us are mines!"

The engines were going at top speed. The boat shot upwards and then bent
down, ripped into the net, jerked, pulled and tore and tore until the
steel net gave way from the force of the attack.

"Hurrah! We are through it! The boat obeys her diving rudder!" Groening
called out from below. "The U-202 goes on her way!"

"Down, keep her down all the time. Dive to a depth of fifty meters," I
commanded. "This is a horrible place--a real hell!"

I bent forward and put my head into my hands. It was rocking as if being
hit by a trip hammer. My forehead ached as if pricked with needles and
my ears buzzed so that I had to press my fingers into them.

"It's a horrible place," I repeated to myself. "And what luck we had,
what a peculiar chance and wonderful escape that we got out at all!"

It took some time for my aching head to remember chronologically what
had happened. Yes, it certainly was lucky that we, at the right moment,
had submerged deep. We had been at a depth of about seventeen meters
when our prow collided with the net, and the detonation followed. The
more I thought of it, the plainer everything became to me.

As we had run against the net, it had stretched and that had set off the
mine. The mines are set in the nets at the height at which the U-boats
generally travel, which is the periscope level. If we had tried to
attack the torpedo boat or, for any other reason, had remained for a few
minutes more at the periscope level, we would have run into the net at a
point where our enemies had hoped we would--namely, so that the mine
would have exploded right under us. Now the mine, on the contrary,
exploded